This page explains my most recent class schedule in greater detail. It will help you understand how the elementary library lesson plans are structured in the Elementary Librarian Community.
This schedule is for a K-5 elementary school that operates on a fixed schedule. Library Skills classes are taught on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and every other Friday (which is a repeat of either Tuesday’s or Thursday’s schedule). Each homeroom visits for library skills five times in a typical month. Classrooms visit the library to check out books on Mondays and Wednesdays.
When classes are in the library on Fridays, they usually read either silently (grades 3-5) or with partners (grades K-2) and take Accelerated Reader tests for the entire class time. Elementary students have very few opportunities in today’s assessment driven schools to simply read for pleasure, so silent reading is included in this library curriculum.
Each homeroom visits for 35 minutes, which amounts to about 30 minutes after everyone settles down and you leave time to line them up in an orderly fashion at the end of class.
The library lesson plans are set up for the use of stations (but can be taught as standalone lessons if preferred). The lessons were set up with this configuration in mind:
Students are divided into three teams at the beginning of the school year or semester. There are 9 student computers in the library, so each group has no more than 9 students in it. If there's a class with more than 27 students, 2 students work on a computer together or a trustworthy student will be allowed to use one of the teacher stations.
The library lesson plans included in the Elementary Librarian Community will typically include 3 main activities for each month. Each of the three activities could be a station. Instead of rotating to each station during a single class session, students rotate each week. This way, each group gets a full 30 minutes in a station.
So this is what a typical month’s library visits might look like:
Week 1: Skill overview in whole group
Week 2: Station #1
Week 3: Station #2
Week 4: Station #3
Extra Friday Class: Silent/Partner Reading
It is not necessary to organize your class this way to use the library lesson plans on this site, but it may be helpful. You can always modify the activities to work in a whole group setting if you prefer. Click here for further explanation on how you could use stations in your library.
